Skip James sang like a ghost from 1865. His falsetto was eerie, his minor-key Bentonia tunings were unlike anything else in the Delta, and "Devil Got My Woman" sounds like it was recorded in another century. Nobody played like Skip James.
The sound was too strange and too personal to imitate.
He recorded 18 sides for Paramount in 1931 and then vanished for 33 years. No recordings, no performances. When the folk revival tracked him down in a Tunica, Mississippi hospital in 1964, he was dying of cancer. He didn't tell them. He just picked up a guitar and played "Devil Got My Woman" like the decades hadn't passed.
He performed at the Newport Folk Festival that year. A ghost summoned back to the stage, playing songs he'd written when Calvin Coolidge was president. The recordings from those comeback sessions are miraculous: the falsetto thinner but more haunting, the guitar fingerpicking more deliberate. He died in 1969.
Skip James was the strangest of the Delta bluesmen. Minor-key tunings nobody else used. A ghostly falsetto. Rediscovered after 33 years of silence, he walked back onto a stage and proved the music had never left him.
